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Brideshead Revisited

Review By: Dan Deevy
DanDeevy@TheCinemaSource.com

I freely admit that I am not the go-to-guy for British period pieces, so when I tell you that I enjoyed this one, it should mean that if this is your bag, you will probably love it!

Brideshead Revisited is not, as I had initially thought, a necrophiliac zombie movie. It’s based on a book written by Evelyn Waugh which also spawned a British television series in 1981 and tells the story of a young middle class man’s encounters with a posh upper crust family at their palatial estate, Brideshead.

With no knowledge of the previous incarnations I can only judge this on the film itself and overall I think it was very well made and the cast was perfectly suited to their roles. With a running time of just about two and a half hours I can’t imagine purists thinking that too many things were left out from the book, but I could be wrong. I felt that while the story dragged a bit towards the end the excessive length was necessary to fully explore all of these characters spanning the many years during which this all takes place.

Matthew Goode plays Charles Ryder an atheist who lost his mother at a very young age and grew up basically all alone with only his distant, affectionless father. When he first heads off to University he meets and catches the attention and fancy of Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) a young man from an extremely wealthy family who despite being surrounded by people also grew up very much alone and isolated. The two become fast friends and Sebastian introduces Charles to the upper echelon of British society that he has always wanted to be a part of. It isn’t long before Charles is welcomed by the family and sucked into the divisive inner workings of living at Brideshead which ultimately lead to a rift between him and Sebastian.

When Sebastian’s sister and closest friend, Julia (Hayley Atwell) enters the picture, Charles finds himself trapped between his true feelings of love and friendship for Sebastian and his sexual attraction to Julia. When the two finally do get together it causes a problem for not only Sebastian as he feels he lost his best friend and the man that he loves, but also for Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) the fanatically Catholic matriarch of the family who will not stand for her daughter marrying a non-catholic middle class no body.

Of all of the complex relationships in this story I have to say that the one between Charles and Sebastian strikes me as the most interesting and the one that people (well, liberal people anyway) will be routing for. You can tell that there is a true love and understanding that exists between the two ...